Anime music video

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  In 1982, a 21-year-old named Jim Kaposztas built what many consider the first anime music video, or AMV. He wired two videocassette recorders together and selected the most violent scenes from the anime series Star Blazers. He synced that footage to the Beatles song "All You Need Is Love" for comic effect.

  That single experiment, done on home equipment, opened a fan practice that later spread across the internet. What actually separates an AMV from an official music video, or from other kinds of fan-made edits? How do editors construct one, technically speaking? Why did the hobby take hold mostly among Western viewers rather than in Japan, where anime originates? And what happens when the musicians or record labels behind the audio track take notice?

• 2. Drawing The Line

  ›

  The song "Breaking the Habit" by Linkin Park carries genuine professional animation, produced by the studio Gonzo. That puts it outside the AMV category entirely, alongside similar professional work made for Daft Punk and Gorillaz. The Japanese duo Chage and Aska released the song "On Your Mark," accompanied by a short film produced by Studio Ghibli. It sits outside the category too, since Ghibli made that animation specifically for the song.

  American media fandom has its own tradition called vidding, built by fans cutting clips from movies and television shows to music. It evolved on a separate track from AMVs, with its own history and culture, even though the results look similar on the surface. Fan videos assembled from movie or television footage rather than anime carry yet another label, songvids. An AMV itself is always a fan composition. It draws clips from one or more anime shows or films, usually Japanese in origin. Though the term usually points to Japanese anime specifically, it can occasionally stretch to include footage from American animation, live action, or video games too. Editors cut that footage against a chosen audio track, most often a song or the audio from a promotional trailer. No musician or record label authorizes the result.

  Finished AMVs mostly circulate through the site AnimeMusicVideos.org, through direct video downloads, and through YouTube. Anime conventions regularly hold AMV contests that screen the finalists and the winning entries.

• 3. Editing Styles

  ›

  Editors reach for software like Sony Vegas or Adobe After Effects to pull off FX editing. That style piles on visual effects until a scene barely resembles its source footage. A plainer approach, called raw editing, sticks to basic zoom in and zoom out effects paired with simple transitions between clips. Timing editing asks the editor to line up footage with the song's lyrics or beats. One example matches a gunshot on screen to a beat in the music. Another makes a character's lips appear to mouth the actual lyrics. Flow editing leans on transitions to keep a video moving, the goal being to avoid rough cuts and choppy parts.

  A newer style, animation editing, takes a single still image and brings it to life, giving it motion it never had in the original footage. The same idea carries over to Manga Music Videos, or MMVs, which apply it to still manga panels instead of anime frames, mixing animation with compositing. Masking asks an editor to strip the background out of a chosen anime scene before layering in new effects. Editors describe it as a painstaking, time-consuming process. A 3D style relies on a built-in virtual camera inside the editing software. Editors often use it to spin 3D text or 3D renderings of anime characters across the screen.

  HMV, short for hentai music video, swaps in hentai clips instead of standard anime footage. The explicit sexual content in that source material keeps these videos confined exclusively to pornography sites rather than mainstream platforms. GMV, or game music video, pulls from video games instead, typically gameplay recordings or in-game cutscenes.

• 4. West Versus Japan

  ›

  John Oppliger, writing for the site AnimeNation, has tracked a clear divide. AMVs draw enthusiastic Western fans but relatively few Japanese ones. He points to language as the first cause. Most Western viewers cannot follow the original Japanese dialogue. According to Oppliger, that absence means "the visuals make a greater impact" on them.

  A second cause, in Oppliger's view, is generational pressure rather than language. He argues that Westerners are "encouraged by social pressure to grow out of cartoons and comics during the onset of adolescence." Japanese fans do not face that same pressure. Japanese viewers instead grow up treating animation "as a constant companion" throughout their lives. That difference in upbringing pushes English-speaking fans toward reworking existing anime footage into AMVs. Japanese fans, per Oppliger, lean more toward creating or extending manga and anime stories of their own.

• 5. The Legal Gray Zone

  ›

  In Japan, anime makers routinely tolerate or even encourage dōjinshi, unauthorized comics that extend an official series past its ending. The manga artist Maki Murakami runs her own circle, called Crocodile Ave, producing dōjinshi based on her series Gravitation. Producers see the practice one of two ways. Either it functions as a tribute, or it draws more support for the original anime than it would otherwise earn alone.

  FUNimation Entertainment copyright specialist Evan Flournay described a similar calculation regarding AMVs in an interview with the site AnimeNewsNetwork. He called fan videos a kind of free advertising for the studio. "The basic thinking going into fan videos is thus: if it whets the audience's appetite, we'll leave it alone. But if it sates the audience's appetite, it needs to come down," he said.

  In November 2005, Wind-up Records contacted Phade, the administrator of AnimeMusicVideos.org, demanding the removal of AMVs built around music by Creed, Evanescence, and Seether. That request came amid a broader push, mostly from the record industry, to pull AMVs from YouTube and AnimeMusicVideos.org. YouTube drew particular attention for its size and its for-profit status. Musicians themselves often see things differently than their labels do. AMV editors have reported friendly contact with artists including Trey Gunn and Mae. The Japanese duo Boom Boom Satellites went further still, partnering with AMVJ Remix Sessions to sanction an official AMV contest. They supplied source footage for entrants to use, and the winning video was featured on one of the pair's tours.

  The first Boom Boom Satellites competition ran in January 2008 around the song "Easy Action" and the anime film Vexille. A second followed in November of that year, built around "Shut Up and Explode" and the series Xam'd: Lost Memories. Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig later cited AMVs directly in his book Code: Version 2.0. He returned to the same example in a talk recorded for Google's AtGoogleTalks Author's Series. There, he pointed to AMVs as a working case study in the legal and creative questions surrounding digital remix culture.